TV Executive Behind ‘Springer’ Tries to Win House Seat for G.O.P.

In fact, as a creator of “The Jerry Springer Show,” he put them on national television.

So when his local congressman, Anthony D. Weiner, resigned after sending salacious photographs to women over the Internet, it was perhaps fitting that Mr. Turner saw an opportunity: he decided to run for national office.

Now, improbably, the former television executive has emerged as a nimble and competitive Republican challenger in the Sept. 13 special election to replace Mr. Weiner, in a campaign that has showcased Mr. Turner’s eye for playful stagecraft and ear for his audience’s tastes.

Aides to Mr. Turner have sounded loud duck calls at events for his Democratic opponent, Assemblyman David I. Weprin, to highlight what they say is his reluctance to participate in debates.

And they invited 20 school-age children to stand in front of the national debt clock in Midtown Manhattan to remind voters that Mr. Weprin once stated incorrectly that the federal deficit was $4 trillion, rather than $14 trillion.

“I do have an appreciation for shtick,” Mr. Turner, 70, conceded with a mischievous laugh. “It draws attention to the race and makes the mundane newsworthy.”

But he insisted in an interview that there are lines that he would not cross. “Like sending a dozen IHOP waffles to Weprin’s campaign office,” he said, recalling an aide’s recent suggestion; “I just thought that was a little over the top.”

The theatrical approach appears to be working: Mr. Turner has captured the attention of national Republicans, who are salivating at the chance of winning a House seat in the blue-hued Ninth Congressional District of Brooklyn and Queens, and of Democrats, who fear that he may spoil a special election in which the party had all but taken winning for granted. A Siena College poll in August showed Mr. Weprin with an advantage of six percentage points, within the margin of sampling error of plus or minus four points.

It is a heady time for Mr. Turner, a crossword buff and amateur mountain climber, who had long viewed politics and public office as a strange and distant universe. “Cynical is how I would describe it,” he said.

He proudly calls himself a “citizen candidate” with the business background and outsider mentality required to fix Washington. But his inexperience on the campaign trail has at times hampered as much as it has helped. He declared, in what he later described as a moment of levity, that “I never met a tax loophole I didn’t like.” And he has confessed to “pandering” to the right with an essay he wrote for National Review, in which he called for the United States to “end subsidies” and “end government dependencies.”

“It was written before this race,” he explained.

Even during his childhood, in the Woodhaven section of Queens in the 1940s and ’50s, Mr. Turner was captivated by the power and possibilities of the embryonic medium of television. After college, when a lucrative offer arrived from AT&T to enter the company’s management training program, he opted instead for lower-paying work in the advertising department of ABC.

He rose quickly, displaying what colleagues recall as keen instincts for TV programming and a blunt, unvarnished style.

Not everyone in television took to him. At CBS’s fledgling cable unit, where he landed in 1981, Mr. Turner said he had refused to sugar-coat the division’s problems for William S. Paley, the network’s much-feared chief executive. “He wouldn’t even look at me,” Mr. Turner said. Mr. Paley stuck around; Mr. Turner did not.

Photo

Robert L. Turner, 70, is running for Congress in the Ninth District of Brooklyn and Queens in a Sept. 13 special election.Credit
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

Back in Queens, Mr. Turner’s sizable family — he had four grown children — was about to expand. One of his sons, a therapist, had met a single mother infected with H.I.V., and wanted his parents to take in her child, an 8-year-old named C. J. It was 1986: AIDS still carried a searing stigma and often a swift death sentence.

“What are you going to do?” Mr. Turner recalled thinking. “Say, ‘No, because I don’t have the room, the money, the time?’ ”

“No excuse,” he recalled. “Bring the kid in.”

After C. J.’s mother died, the Turners formally adopted him.

By the early 1990s, Mr. Turner was overseeing popular talk shows like “Donahue” and “Sally Jessy Raphael” at Multimedia Entertainment, a production company. It was there that he and a team of executives gave birth to Mr. Springer’s show, a profitable ratings smash but a public relations headache.

Mr. Turner shelved six episodes because he deemed their content wildly inappropriate; he suspended Mr. Springer’s executive producer for disobeying company policies; and he faced down calls by alarmed lawmakers in Washington to somehow regulate the show.

But he kept the show on the air. “It was pretty gutsy,” said Mr. Springer, an avowed liberal, who spoke admiringly of Mr. Turner’s character even as he gently mocked his conservative politics. (“His only flaw,” Mr. Springer said.)

“That is part of the character of Bob Turner — he sticks by you,” Mr. Springer said.

Mr. Turner makes no apologies for the Springer show, but seems eager to distance himself from its raunchiest content. (An episode titled “I Married a Horse” was broadcast after he left.)

“For a guy who likes the Metropolitan Opera and museums,” he said, “Jerry is not exactly my proudest moment, you know, as you can imagine.”

Asked if the show contributed to the coarsening of daytime television, Mr. Turner replied, “It probably did.”

He was retired from television and uninterested in a splashy second act when he caught an episode of “The O’Reilly Factor” in 2010. The guest was Mr. Weiner, a Democrat, who used the airtime to defend President Obama’s overhaul of health care in what Mr. Turner saw as “such a nonsensical, arrogant way.”

Mr. Turner called the only person he knew in New York politics, Michael R. Long, the chairman of the state’s Conservative Party, and asked who was running against Mr. Weiner in the next election. “I want to send them a check,” he told Mr. Long.

The answer, it turned out, was nobody. “From that point on,” Mr. Turner said, “it was me.”

He performed well for a Republican in a solidly Democratic district, collecting 39 percent of the vote in the 2010 race against Mr. Weiner. He figured his adventure in politics was over until Mr. Weiner was caught engaging in sexual banter with women online.

This time, it was the local political operatives who turned to Mr. Turner, not the other way around. “They asked me to run,” he recounted.

The electoral math was still daunting, but Republicans had just retaken the House and had the president on the defensive. What had previously seemed unthinkable — a Congressional seat in Brooklyn and Queens falling to the Republican Party — no longer appeared so far-fetched.

A version of this article appears in print on September 8, 2011, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: TV Executive Behind ‘Springer’ Tries to Win House Seat for G.O.P. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe